Submarine Trivia
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44 free Submarine trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Submarines are the stealthiest machines ever built, and their story runs from a hand-cranked wooden acorn in the American Revolution to nuclear boats that stay under for six months. This quiz covers the whole span. Fifty questions take in Cornelis Drebbel's oar-powered submersible, Bushnell's Turtle, the Confederate Hunley, John Philip Holland and the US Navy's first sub, the U-boat campaigns of both world wars, USS Nautilus under the North Pole, the giant Typhoon class, the bathyscaphe Trieste at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, and the losses of Thresher, Kursk and Titan. There is a technical strand too: ballast tanks, the sail versus the conning tower, why boats are called boats, the snorkel, Gertrude the underwater telephone and how a crew makes oxygen. And a pop-culture strand for people who know Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October, Captain Nemo and the Beatles better than any navy. Easy questions ask what a periscope is for; the hard ones want the first steam-powered military sub and the year women first served on Norwegian boats. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on submarines and the individual boats, films and books, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How do nuclear submarines get drinking water for their crews on long patrols?
By making it from seawater
By making it from seawater: the reactor's electricity powers the life-support systems that turn seawater into drinking water and keep the air breathable.
Q 02Which Dutchman built the first submersible for which reliable construction records exist, in 1620?
Cornelis Drebbel
Cornelis Drebbel: his oar-driven boats were tested in the Thames, and the last and largest was shown to King James I and thousands of Londoners.
Q 03What was the name of the first military submersible, a one-man hand-powered craft built in 1775?
Turtle
Turtle: by American accounts, its pilot tried in 1776 to screw a mine onto HMS Eagle but couldn't bore into the hull.
Q 04Which American inventor built a submarine for France and tested it in the Seine in 1800?
Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton: he later switched sides, taking his underwater weapons to Britain and its prime minister, William Pitt.
Q 05The 'Fire Diver', a submarine launched in 1850 that sank on trials weeks later, came from which country?
Germany
Germany: when Wilhelm Bauer's Brandtaucher sank in Kiel harbour, he and two crewmen let water in until they could open the hatch and escape.
Q 06Which submarine became the first to sink an enemy ship, during the American Civil War in 1864?
H. L. Hunley
H. L. Hunley: it sank USS Housatonic off Charleston, but was lost with its whole crew before it could return to base.
Q 07The French Plongeur of 1863, the first submarine driven by machinery rather than muscle, ran on what?
Compressed air
Compressed air: Jules Verne studied a model of Plongeur at the 1867 Paris exhibition and drew on it for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
Q 08Who designed Ictíneo II, the first combustion-powered submarine, launched in Barcelona in 1864?
Narcís Monturiol
Narcís Monturiol: soon after its steam trials his company ran out of money, and the submarine was seized and broken up for scrap.
Q 09Which British engineer designed the first practical self-propelled torpedo, in 1866?
Robert Whitehead
Robert Whitehead: working in Fiume, he developed it from a prototype by Giovanni Luppis, a retired Austrian naval captain.
Q 10The US Navy's first commissioned submarine, bought in 1900, was named after which inventor?
John Philip Holland
John Philip Holland: the boat passed the Navy's tests, and more submarines of its type were soon ordered from his company.
Q 11During its 1904–05 war with Japan, Russia sent submarines by rail to which port?
Vladivostok
Vladivostok: after the long rail journey, Delfin and other submarines began war patrols from the port early in 1905.
Q 12The U-boat sinking of which liner is often cited among the reasons the US entered World War I?
RMS Lusitania
RMS Lusitania: 128 Americans died when it was torpedoed in 1915, yet the US didn't declare war on Germany until April 1917.
Q 13What does the German word 'Unterseeboot', shortened to U-Boot, literally mean?
Undersea boat
Undersea boat: in German a U-Boot can be any submarine, but in English 'U-boat' means a German one.
Q 21Which ship did the CIA use in 1974 to secretly raise part of Soviet submarine K-129?
Glomar Explorer
Glomar Explorer: when a journalist later asked for records, the CIA said it could 'neither confirm nor deny' its links, coining the 'Glomar response'.
Q 22USS Thresher sank in April 1963 while doing what?
Deep-diving tests
Deep-diving tests: its last garbled messages to the escort ship Skylark reported 'minor difficulties' and a 'positive up angle'.
Q 23Which Argentine warship did the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror sink in 1982?
General Belgrano
General Belgrano: it was outside Britain's declared exclusion zone when hit, so its sinking stirred bitter controversy.
Q 14Which German term names the U-boat mass attacks known in English as wolfpacks?
Rudeltaktik
Rudeltaktik: packs guided by radio gathered around a convoy and struck on the surface at night.
Q 15Which wartime leader later wrote that the U-boat peril was the only thing that really frightened him?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill: island Britain depended on shipped-in supplies to survive, and the U-boats were out to cut that Atlantic lifeline.
Q 16Which navy operated World War II submarines that could carry multiple aircraft?
Japan
Japan: each giant I-400 carried three Seiran floatplane bombers, meant for a surprise strike on the Panama Canal's locks.
Q 17HMS Venturer sank U-864 in 1945, the only recorded case of what?
Sinking a sub while both were submerged
Sinking a sub while both were submerged: U-864 was carrying mercury to Japan, and the toxic metal has since leaked from the wreck.
Q 18Which was the world's first nuclear-powered submarine?
USS Nautilus
Launched in January 1954 and sponsored by Mamie Eisenhower, she is now a museum ship in Groton, Connecticut.
Q 19Which submarine was the first to surface through the ice at the North Pole, in March 1959?
USS Skate
USS Skate: its crew scattered the ashes of explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins there, who had tried and failed to reach the Pole by submarine in 1931.
Q 20As of 2025, which Soviet-designed submarine class was the largest ever built?
Typhoon
Typhoon: displacing up to 48,000 tonnes submerged, these subs could even launch their long-range missiles while tied up at the dock.
Q 24The Russian submarine Kursk sank in which sea in August 2000, killing all 118 aboard?
Barents Sea
Barents Sea: investigators blamed hydrogen peroxide fuel leaking from a torpedo, which set off the blasts that sank the submarine.
Q 25The OceanGate submersible that imploded in 2023 was diving to which famous wreck?
Titanic
Titanic: Titan was OceanGate's only sub able to reach that depth, and all five aboard, including CEO Stockton Rush, were killed.
Q 26Which vessel carried Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in 1960?
Trieste
Trieste: the Navy had bought the Swiss-designed bathyscaphe in 1958, and Walsh's co-pilot, Jacques Piccard, was its designer's son.
Q 27What do submarines fill with water or air to dive and surface?
Ballast tanks
Ballast tanks: to surface, the crew shuts the vents and blows compressed air into the tanks, forcing the water back out.
Q 28What is the tall structure on top of a modern submarine called in American usage?
The sail
The sail: it was once called the conning tower, but modern subs keep their controls down in the hull, so the tower became the sail.
Q 29On a double-hulled submarine, what is the inner, watertight hull called?
The pressure hull
The pressure hull: the outer light hull around it floods freely, so only the inner shell has to hold back the sea.
Q 30Which experimental US submarine pioneered the modern teardrop hull in the 1950s?
USS Albacore
USS Albacore: built as a research submarine for underwater speed, its hull design went on to influence later US submarines.